[Eueudhsbsj32]

Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not?

You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.

[Planktonne]

We read books because the words convey meaning, not because they appear to.

[titularcomment]

Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.

[Eueudhsbsj32]

So you're implying AI is incapable of producing meaningful output? Have you not used models from the last few years?

[WolfeReader]

They may have been implying it; I'll say it.

Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output.

It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data).

Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.

[Eueudhsbsj32]

In what way does a human author "understand the meaning" that AI does not?

Just because a brain is made from organic material rather than silicon, doesn't make it less of a prediction machine.

[WolfeReader]

Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly.

The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one.

The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.

[Eueudhsbsj32]

You're just describing different ways of learning concepts. Learning from lived experience and learning from reading the experience of the others are both valid.

AI is doing a lot more than just regurgitating facts. It can take abstract concepts and apply them reasonably well in novel scenarios.

To make things more concrete, how about you name a specific concept that you believe a frontier model can't grasp?